We showed Wood, Vallance and Leggat’s West Cordova Street retail premises a few posts back. Like the Army and Navy store today, the company operated on both sides of the alley between Cordova and Hastings. Here’s the wholesale and office portion of the business, on West Hastings Street as it looked in 1908, six years after the company bought out Thomas Dunn’s hardware and ship’s chandlers business. However, on Hastings Street the previous business owner wasn’t Dunn, it was E G Prior who sold hardware and machinery.

Prior was a Yorkshireman who trained as a mining engineer, and worked in the Nanaimo coal mines. He was appointed Inspector of Mines in 1877, living in Victoria, representing that city in parliament from 1886 (and establishing his trading company a few years earlier on Yates Street). Prior was elected an MP but lost his seat in 1900 because of violations of the Electoral Act. He became Premier of BC in 1902, only to be dismissed in 1903 following a charge of conflict of interest, He remained an MLA until his defeat in 1904, and was appointed lieutenant-governor of BC in 1919, only to die in office in 1920.

E G Prior & Co were operating in Vancouver some time after 1891 (as this 1893 advert shows) and established the Hastings Street premises around 1900. They apparently didn’t sell the business to Wood, Vallance and Leggat as they had Thomas Hooper design a new warehouse on Beatty Street in 1910. The company also had premises on Pender Street that were expanded in 1901 by a Victoria architect, W R Wilson.

We haven’t been able to discover the architect of the Prior building which looks as if it was built in 1899. It could be W T Dalton, who designed a number of Hastings Street premises around the turn of the century. In 1903 Wood, Vallance and Leggat hired Dalton & Co – (presumably Mr Eveleigh) to design a $9,000 addition to the building.

The building in the picture didn’t last very long. Hastings Street had become an important public street, full of theatres and department stores, and wholesale warehouses were moving elsewhere.

In 1913 architect P M Julien applied for a permit for the Rex Amusement Co to build a $40,000 theatre, and the Rex Theatre appeared soon after (it was operating by 1914). It’s listed as a 922 seat theatre, and was used for some vaudeville acts before transforming to a movie house. J A Schuberg, a theatrical impresario from Winnipeg bought a half share in the theatre in 1916 and by 1918 the Rex was described as “the leading highclass photoplay house of the British Columbia metropolis” Schuberg’s First National Exhibitor Circuit Exchange of Canada distributed movies throughout BC and the prairies, with exclusive rights to Charlie Chaplin’s movies.

It was still operating in 1950 when this VPL Artray photo was taken, but in 1959 was closed to be incorporated into the adjacent Army and Navy store. Sadly, underneath that ‘modern’ metal screen there are no vestiges of the theatre facade – it was replaced with concrete blocks..

Photo source, City of Vancouver Archives CVA Bu P500

We’ve seen the building on the left back in 1890 when it was the YMCA Building and agin in 1910 when it was The Hotel Astor. By 1923 when this picture was taken it had become the Astoria Hotel (and it still had that name in 1947).  The building we know today as the Astoria on East Hastings  only took the name later – in 1923 it was still the Toronto Apartments.

Next door to the east is the Selkirk Block. In this image Rae’s Shoes and The New York Outfitting Co are the retailers on the main floor. By 1926 F W Woolworth had taken over both units. Like the hotel conversion from the YMCA, at least half this building seems to have been designed by Dalton and Eveleigh for Crowe and Wilson. The eastern half was given a permit in 1909 for a $15,000 building constructed by Bedford Davidson, while the western half which seems to be older was altered by the same owners. That suggests that it was built at different times, although completed to appear to be a single structure. We haven’t been able to find out when it first appeared (but this 1908 image shows it only 25 feet wide), or where the name Selkirk came from (although the mining town of the same name is an obvious possibility). In 1920 Davidson again carried out an addition to the building for Crowe and Wilson, this time  for a 1 story and basement extension to make a home for the Tip Top Tailors.

We have noted another of Wilson’s developments before, also using Dalton and Eveleigh to design a substantial block on Granville Street. His development partner on West Hastings, Sanford Johnson Crowe was from Truro, Nova Scotia, apprenticed as a carpenter and arrived in Vancouver in 1888. He partnered with Wilson in 1901, and a 1914 biography said “As a contractor he saw opportunity for judicious investments and from time to time added to his holdings until he now derives a gratifying annual income therefrom.”

He was successful enough to retire by 1910, aged 42, in order to enter politics. He was a City Alderman in 1909-15, He was elected to the Canadian House of Commons in the 1917 wartime election and ran as a Liberal-Unionist supporter of Sir Robert Borden’s Government defeating a Laurier Liberal opponent in Vancouver’s Burrard electoral district. He was appointed to the Canadian Senate in 1921 by Borden’s successor, Arthur Meighen and sat in the upper house until his death ten years later. Crowe was married with two sons and lived in the West End. 

Today both buildings have been replaced by the Woodwards development (the previous department store version  bumped into the Selkirk Block in 1947, as this VPL image shows).

Picture source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA Str N52.1, VPL.

Here’s the block designed by Dalton and Eveleigh for E E Hewson in 1910, built at a cost of $36,000 by Baynes and Horie. It was at least the second building the architects had designed for Mr Hewson -  they designed another on ‘West Hastings between Cambie Street and Abbott Street’ in 1906. They also designed $1,200 worth of work for Mr Hewson at 120 West Hastings in 1913 – so perhaps that was the earlier building – (it is the correct block). The Richards building was called the St Regis (before the St Regis Hotel was built) – and seems to have been rooms rather than a hotel.

E E Hewson is something of a mystery – there’s no sign of anyone with that name in BC in any census around the turn of the century. Although Dalton and Eveleigh’s entry in a 1913 biography refers to them being ‘architects to the Hewson estate’, it doesn’t mention any other information about any Hewsons. We know there was an E E Hewson who was Vice President of the Hinton Electric Company in Vancouver - because in the year the St Regis was built he wrote rather cryptically to the Hon W L Mackenzie King against the introduction of an 8-hour work day: “The government doubtless bears in mind that the employers are not a few capitalists alone with such large resources as that the receiving of a dividend from their industries is a small matter, but that the stock and bonds of most of our companies are distributed widely among the plain people who feel the pinch if they do not receive any returns.”

Hinton Electric Company evolved out of George C. Hinton and Company around 1899. It was initially composed of John A. and George C. Hinton and operated in Victoria between 1899 to 1920. The company also operated a Vancouver Branch for several of these years. The company provided electrical machinery, wiring and supplies. There’s another E E Hewson running a huge woolen mill in Nova Scotia – but there’s no obvious link we can find to Vancouver.

 

This photograph dates from the 1920s, and we aren’t sure how long the building lasted here. It was still standing in 1981, at which time it was known as the Burrard Hotel (not the first structure to have this name, by any means).  These days the site is one of any a handful left in the city with its current use – a surface parking lot. It’s part of Budget Car Rental’s parking which was next door to the streamline moderne car showroom built by Collier’s in 1948 which later operated as an outlet for Fido phones until it was demolished a few years ago.

 

Picture source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 99-3098

The Burrard Hotel was announced in the Contract Record in 1905 as being built on the corner of Homer and Cordova. A year later the Cosmopolitan Hotel was recorded in the Street Directory as being on the same corner site – in 1907 the address disappears, and only in 1908 does the Burrard Hotel finally get a mention. The odd thing is that until 1906 (when the site was listed as vacant) there was a Cosmopolitan Hotel at 101 West Cordova.

Mr David Gibb and his son built the hotel - the architects were Dalton and Eveleigh, and the Gibbs spent $16,000 on the site (according to a report in the Province newspaper in October 1905) and $25,000 on building the hotel. The report said they had already commenced construction of a three storey cut sandstone 40 room hotel. The newspaper report also explained how the site had previously been owned by Mr W J Van Houten and his associates who had previously planned a hotel deal with another party which had fallen through.

In 1912 the owner was listed as Andy Johnson, who had a $5,000 permit to alter the hotel with Tolman & Co as the architect/builders. Tolman & Co were builders rather than architects; they also built Israel Powell’s Ashnola Apartments on Main Street at East 6th Avenue. Mr Johnson was a partner of Atkins Johnson and Stewart who built the Pacific Transfer Co warehouse on East Cordova in 1903. As can be seen – at some point the building had a fourth floor added – perhaps that was the work Mr Johnson commissioned.

By 1919 the owner was Neil Cummins, who lived in New Westminster. The hotel had already transitioned in part to residential use; an auto salvage worker, a bartender at the Ranier Hotel, a carpenter and a clerk all listed the hotel as their residence. Three years later only the owners, Mr Cummins, and his partner Frank Vinnicombe were listed as living at the hotel.

Our picture shows the hotel in 1933 – it seems to have been demolished in the early 1940s. The last directory entry is in 1940, when for some reason the address switched to Homer Street. In 1941 the hotel name lives on, but attached to a property on the 700 block of Richards Street. The site became a parking lot until the construction of the parkade that’s still there in 1954, which gained an extra two floors in 1978 when it was linked to the Harbour Centre redevelopment. The parkade structure on the other end of the block is older, dating back to 1933.

Picture source, City of Vancouver Archives CVA 99-4408, Province newspaper extract from Heritage Vancouver.

Back in 1967 this rather large house was for sale for $63,000 (offers). The owner wanted to sell as an apartment site, and if the new owner wanted to keep it as a revenue opportunity (the tenants paid $600 a month in total) then the purchaser had to carry out an internal inspection – but couldn’t disturb the tenants. A rather classy past was suggested from the driveway for five cars, and five garages.

The house dated back to 1912, when it was built at the not inconsiderable sum of $3,300. It was designed by noted and prolific local architects Dalton and Eveleigh, and the client was the younger half of that partnership, S M Eveleigh. Sydney Morgan Eveleigh was born in Bedford in England, and appears to have studied architecture at school, arriving in Vancouver aged 18 and immediately starting work for N S Hoffar, the new city’s premier architect at the time. Eveleigh returned to England to study for two years, returned to Vancouver and from 1895 worked initially for W T Dalton and soon after as a partner.

Eveleigh was involved in the city’s literary scene from early on, and was an active member of the library board. It was he who contacted Andrew Carnegie, and the five $10,000 cheques that helped build the new library were personally made out to Eveleigh. As architects Dalton and Eveleigh designed dozens of buildings in the city including many featured on the blog, including the Alcazar Hotel, the Wilson Block on Granville and the Masonic Temple at Seymour and Georgia, (Eveleigh was very active in Freemasonry). Eveleigh’s membership of the Vancouver Automobile Club no doubt helps explain the garages.

The family lived in the house until 1927, when Miss A MacRae moved in. Over the years a variety of owners and later lodgers lived there and by the 1960s it had lost much of the charm that it must once have had. The wooden addition with the stone printed asphalt sheeting didn’t help with the appearance (although no doubt it added to the rent roll). 

Despite the hope that it would be torn down for apartments, that wouldn’t happen for several more years. In 1987 Charlotte Gardens, designed by MacDonald-Hale Architects was built on the site.

The city’s newspapers clustered around Victory Square – or in earlier years around the Courthouse that was located there. The Province had their office and printworks there, as did the News Herald. The News Herald was established by journalists no longer working for the Morning Star, a newspaper whose offices were around the corner across from Victory Square on Pender Street. Here’s the Morning Star offices in 1929, five years after the paper started life as the Star, published as an evening paper. After a rapid change of ownership and a deal with one of the rival papers, the Sun, the Star became the Morning Star and the Sun the Evening Sun.

As was true of some, but by no means all of the papers of the day the Star aimed for accuracy and fairness, even in politics. The Star claimed a link back to the city’s first successful paper, the News Advertiser, initially published in 1887 and merged into the Sun in 1917. The Star never really made any money for its owner, Victor Odlum, and was sold to a new owner in Calgary who lost $300,000 in the venture before selling it back to Odlum in 1931. The losses continued, a proposed 15% wage reduction was rejected by the workforce, and the paper closed in 1932, leaving no morning newspaper in the city.

The newpaper office the Star occupied were originally a new home for the News Advertiser. Like the later Star, it was noted for its painstaking accuracy and detailed reporting, but unlike the Star it was a strong Conservative supporter. It was run for many years by Francis Carter Cotton, and occupied a number of buildings before moving to a new building on the corner of Hamilton and Pender in 1907. That’s the building in the picture, which has no identified architect in its heritage write-up, but Dalton and Eveleigh are said to be the designers. In 1910 Thomas Hooper designed additions to the building, the same year another owner acquired the paper, which would end up being merged into the Sun newspaper.

The building is still there today, stucco covered and without the cornice, but still solid for over 100 years of history.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives, Morning Star Building 1929, CVA 99-3784

The Hotel Alcazar sat on Dunsmuir Street, close to the Dunsmuir Hotel. Designed by Dalton and Eveleigh, it was completed in 1912 in the boom that saw much of Downtown Vancouver developed. It cost $140,000 to build for Dr D H Wilson and it lasted for 70 years before it was demolished. Dr Wilson was a medical doctor, born in Ontario in 1855, who practiced in Manitoba. He was elected to the Manitoba legislature in 1882 and became Minister of Public Works, got married in 1887 and resigned from politics in 1888. He moved to Vancouver the next year, practiced medicine for another five years, and then retired (again) with directorships in a number of financial and insurance companies. When he died in 1926 his estate was worth $85,000.  

The site of the hotel sat for another decade before Musson Cattell Mackey’s postmodern headquarters for BC Hydro were constructed on the site. These days the front of the office includes a water feature called Water Works by Tokyo-born Tony Bloom that was inspired, it is said, by a traditional Japanese deer scarer, a shishi odoshi. The Alcazar also featured some somewhat unexpected art in the form of Jack Shadbolt murals from the 1940s that could be found in the dining room.

Although Parr and Fee had most of Granville Street’s design work sewn up, it wasn’t a complete monopoly. C H Wilson commissioned Dalton and Eveleigh to design a warehouse that he then built in 1910 for $75,000. Crowe and Wilson (the same Wilson) had built a single storey building to the left of the warehouse in 1904, which they designed themselves.  The 1910 warehouse is the right hand building in the picture – if you look closely you can see that the left hand 4 windows are slightly different from the right hand six. W T Dalton had designed many buildings developed by Crowe and Wilson over the previous decade. Some time after 1912 the second part of the building was added. Charles H Wilson had arrived in Vancouver three weeks after the fire in 1886 from Ontario and rapidly joined the real estate boom as both a contractor and real estate broker. He was successful enough to have an area called Wilson Heights named after him (and 41st Avenue was Wilson Avenue for a while). He was elected Alderman from 1902 to 1905.

In the 1920s the Manufacturers’ Association of British Columbia used the larger building as a showcase for BC produced goods – which suggests a somewhat more important role for this part of town than would be the case today. The building had the rather misleading slogan ‘B. C. Art Gallery’ painted on. By 1939 when this picture was taken William Warrall’s funiture emporium had taken over the building and advertised their 42,000 of space over five floors. In 1989 Perkins and Cheung designed the substantial renovations for Tom Lee Music, a company who opened their first store in Hong Kong in 1953. The small single storey building to the left of the warehouse also dates back to 1910 and was designed by A J Bird for J R Reid. The building to the right is the Vermilyea Block.

Here’s the Hotel Astor in 1910.  The Ormidale Block is just to the west, Woodwards Department Store is to the east, and it was probably designed by Dalton and Eveleigh for Crowe and Wilson and finished the year before. Swain Sherdahl, who also owned the Dominion Hotel on Water Street, had a controlling interest in the building. Until recently we hadn’t realised that the hotel use took Thomas Hooper’s 1890 YMCA building and converted it for hotel use, adding a canopy but removing the fancy cornice.

By 1917 it was owned by Mr Frank McIntyre of W H Malkin and Co decided to have the hotel remodelled for store purposes, and T A Fee got the design job.

Now it’s the western end of the huge redevelopment of the Woodwards property, and part of the Simon Fraser University presence in the scheme. Developed by Westbank and designed by Henriquez Partners it was completed in 2010

The building on the corner is now part of the Vancouver Film School, but it started life in 1903 as the Royal Bank of Canada. Dalton and Eveleigh designed the first classical bank in the city, and it used poured concrete with steel reinforcements for the foundations – one of the earliest buildings to feature this innovative technological advance. This allowed construction of secure vaults with walls over half a metre thick.

The building was developed and constructed by Vancouver pioneer, Jonathan Rogers, who also built the adjacent building to the west in 1899. It was started in October, and a huge umbrella was raised over the site to allow work in the winter rain. The small building next door started life in 1903 as the Bank of Nova Scotia, like the Royal Bank designed by Dalton and Eveleigh. The Canadian Pacific Telegraph Building from 1901 is to the west, and the huge building across Richards Street is the Standard Building.